The period that begins with last week’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and
continues through tonight’s Remembrance Day for the Fallen of
Israel’s Wars is dominated by the themes of sacrifice, death and loss.

By the time we get around to the joyous celebration of Jewish
sovereignty on Independence Day on Thursday, we will have traversed a
turbulent emotional gauntlet of tears and mourning. The sadness that
permeates this week leading up to Independence Day is tempered by an
accompanying conviction that our collective suffering and sacrifices
were not pointless.

We are partially consoled by the knowledge that painful sacrifice in
the countless wars and battles fought in the past 64 years against
those seeking a violent end to the Zionist project has helped ensure
political self-determination for Jews for the first time in nearly
two millennia. Through memorial services for the fallen, we mourn the
deceased while acknowledging their contribution.

Unfortunately, since the rise of new historians and radical social
scientists beginning in the 1980s, it has become fashionable to
criticize the way we memorialize our deceased.

Just this week, Prof. Avner Ben-Amos of Tel Aviv University told
Haaretz why he thinks the way we memorialize fallen
soldiers “flattens history.”

“Since 1967, Israel’s wars have basically been meant to protect
territories we captured,” claimed Ben-Amos. “That is, these are wars
that actually have no justification, including the 1973 Yom Kippur
War, which today we know could have been prevented. You could say
these deaths were superfluous, but in the ceremonies the soldiers are
depicted as passive victims.”

Meanwhile, in the same Haaretz article, culture scholar Dalia
Gavriely-Nuri lamented the fact that “even if the music [used in
memorial ceremonies] is updated, the songs still preserve a military
value system and present the IDF as our biggest cultural given.”

For Ben-Amos, Gavriely-Nuri and other like-minded critics of our
society, Israel’s purported “militarism” is to be blamed for the
ongoing bloody conflict, not Arab aggression and hatred. These
radical social scientists would have us believe that if only we stop
honoring our deceased as heroes or as innocent victims and begin
acknowledging our own complicity in the incessant warfare that has
plagued the Jewish state from its very inception, we will take a
significant step toward ending the conflict.

Put in social science terminology, our “construction of collective
memory” – via memorial services and the accompanying songs and
symbols that “preserve a military value system” – perpetuates the war
with our neighbors.

But Ben-Amos, Gavriely-Nuri and other self-styled “radical social
scientists” and “new historians” have mixed up cause and effect. Of
course we preserve a military value system and encourage our youths
to serve in the IDF. But we do this not because Israeli society is
inherently jingoistic, rather because we have no other choice.

As long as our many enemies continue to try to destroy us, Israel is
forced to maintain a policy of universal conscription. But the stream
of mainstream Zionism articulated by David Ben-Gurion, Berl
Katznelson and Yitzhak Tabenkin is not a militaristic movement. Tel
Aviv University’s Anita Shapira and other historians have shown that
the pre-state Labor Zionist movement only reluctantly took arms in
the face of Palestinian violence and for years upheld a policy
of “restraint.”

Of course the Yom Kippur War – and every other war Israel ever
fought – could have been prevented. If only the Palestinians had
accepted the 1947 partition plan; if only Gamel Abdel Nasser had not
amassed troops on our southern border in 1967 and called for Israel’s
destruction; if only Syria and Egypt under Anwar Sadat had not
launched a surprise attack on Israel in 1973; if only the PLO had not
used Lebanon as a base to fire Katyusha rockets and launch terror
attacks in the 1970s and early 1980s.

But there was very little – if anything – that Israel could have done
to prevent the many wars it has waged in the past 64 years – besides
disappearing.